Observations focused on the problems of an underdeveloped country, Venezuela, with some serendipity about the world (orchids, techs, science, investments, politics) at large. A famous Venezuelan, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, referred to oil as the devil's excrement. For countries, easy wealth appears indeed to be the sure path to failure. Venezuela might be a clear example of that.

Archive for November 14th, 2010

(If you invent the wheel, I will invent communism and take the wheel away from you. Get it?)

Chavez comments today in his Alo Presidente simply show how out of touch he is these days. The man who used to walk the streets, no longer even rides the subway, limiting himself to making statements of what he is told and clearly, he is not being told the truth. He rides in helicopters accompanied by more helicopters. He is simply out of touch:

Well, let’s see: Polar pays higher. Polar will pay tomorrow four months year and bonus, while Chavez will pay three in three installments. Polar pays severance when your leave. Polar does not force its workers to go to political rallies or wear any t-shirts. Polar gives each worker two cases of beer every month.

Did you even see the people that were jailed? Did you ask where they live? They all live on your once stronghold of the West of Caracas. These “politicians” included a lactating woman, also a pregnant one, this all happened in Pro-Patria, once your enclave, not in fancy neighborhoods, very far from the oligarchs. The bald guy who was prominent on the pictures said: I am just a user of the subway, all we ask is that the Government respond and fixed the subway”

Hugo why don’t you jail those that gave the maintenance contract to the Spaniards, who now have no clue how to fix things? Take a ride in the subway, but don’t call in advance. Look at the pictures.

Hugo, Hugo. You should read the book how to lies with statistics. If you calculate the same per capita income using the SITME exchange rate, it is no longer among the highest. And if those that suck up to you did not fake numbers so much, you would realize that it is impossible to save money to anyone earning even two or three times minimum wage. Do you know how much salaries have gone up this year in the public sector? 6.5% when inflation, so far in the year is 23%. You have all your expenses paid for, go out, try to buy something even in your Bolivarian supermarkets.

Unfortunately Hugo, if you apply the same criteria, then you are the biggest crook of them all. You have promised housing over and over again and have been unable to build more houses than Caldera did in any given year in any of your long and tiring eleven years in Government. Why don’t you measure yourself against the same criteria?

If you did, you and your urban planners would all be in jail. Same if you jail those that do not complete housing projects.And please don’t make empty promises again that sound so fake like you did today: “Now we really are going to build housing”

Really?

With that sentence you admit you have failed and you are once again promising what you can’t deliver.

Hugo, Hugo. If you barely understand socialism and hate capitalism, why do you even want to play being capitalist? When someone buys a share of CANTV (Of which you own 95%) CANTV gets nothing, the owner of the shares does. So, when shares trade hand, the company that issued the shares gets absolutely nothing. Only when you do an IPO (Initial Public Offering) does the company get something. And Hugo, let me tell you, in your long eleven years in power, there was only ONE, yes, just “UNO” IPO’s in the local exchange and I don’t want to say the name, because you hate that company.

But going back to CANTV, you own the shares. You removed the possibility of Venezuelans buying CANTV shares, because you monopolized them all. In fact, so far in 2010 a total of 170,000 shares of CANTV have traded in the Caracas Stock Exchange that you want to compete with. At Bs. 3.35 per share average, that is about Bs. 565,000 total for the whole year (About $120,000 at the Bs. 4.3 rate). At Bs. 10,000 per worker like you suggested today, the whole of CANTV trading would acommodate about 56 (five six) of your three million public workers. Not simple Hugo.

Think about it, at 0.5% commission, all of CANTV would generate in all of 2010 about Bs. 2,000 in commissions for your public exchange (About 500 bucks ta the higher rate of Bs. 4.3). That does not even pay the daily lunch of the President of that new Exchange.

You better ask your advisers about these numbers, you are about to create a whole bureaucracy and subsidy…for nothing.

But again, you are a socialist, why your interest in developing capitalism?

–Finally Hugo, just a suggestion, why don’t you say you will jail any of your collaborators that offers you something and fails by say 20%. Thus, if next year GDP grows by less than 1.6%, there goes Giordani to jail. If inflation is more than 27%, uups.., there goes Giordani again to jail. If oil production falls, uups, there goes Ramirez.